Digital video recording devices are becoming smaller, cheaper and more common and can now be found in a broad range of consumer electronic devices, including cellular telephones, smartphones, digital cameras, action cameras, and automobiles. The demand for video capture has been bolstered by new and growing online media services.
Video stabilization attempts to align video frames that are misaligned because of hand motions or platform vibrations. As small, lightweight hand held devices are used more for video capture, more video suffers from this misalignment. To stabilize the video, the motion of the camera is estimated. This motion is then smoothed and compensated. Motion smoothing attempts to allow for slow intentional hand motions like panning and zooming. Motion compensation attempts to compensate for shaky unintentional hand motions.
Many of these devices offer built-in video processing technologies. The processing may be performed as the video is received or it may be performed later in a computer workstation. The processing may include stabilization, object tracking, object recognition, exposure compensation, and many others. Stabilization techniques may be used to allow pleasing videos to be captured without the need for a stable support such as tripod or dolly.
Many video stabilization techniques rely on first estimating the camera's motion so that it can be distinguished from motion in the scene. Camera motion may be used in digital video stabilization (DVS), and also in frame rate conversions (FRC) and different multi-frame computational photography (CP) algorithms. Camera motion estimation is directed toward compensating movements for smooth transitions in areas that a viewer will perceive as a background. Areas that contain local motion, typically the foreground, can be handled differently using the camera motion as well.